1054 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Dec. 31, 1910. 
from the arm were two well traveled trails, and 
where the soil was soft, we could easily make 
out old plantigrade’s footprints. To me there 
was something strangely stirring in the sight 
of those great tracks so like the print of an 
Indian’s moccasin, but to even my inexperi¬ 
enced eye, they appeared old; and when we ex¬ 
amined the oak trees, I was confirmed in my 
suspicion. The tips of the branches were 
broken down, but they were untouched with 
frost when broken. “.This is a gold brick,” I 
told the barber, “we are ten days too late, for 
you remember that killing frost came just about 
ten days ago.” 
As Waupoose had intimated, the grouse came 
with sunset, and I have never seen anything 
like it. Some alighted in the trees beneath 
which we were standing, and as we remained 
immovable, their curiosity got the better of 
their natural timidity. How they talked, cran¬ 
ing their necks this way and that. Two or three 
birds walked leisurely .in, conversing sociably 
as they meandered along; when about twenty 
feet from us they joined those in the low 
branches of the oak and exchanged comments 
with the earlier arrivals. We were the center 
of attraction. I have stood before some audi¬ 
ences in my time, but never before a more in¬ 
teresting one. Perhaps if public speakers 
would practice keeping still, they would hold 
their audiences to better advantage. 
Approaching an immovable person is an old 
trick of grouse. Chipmunks played about our 
feet. A red squirrel, wishing to ascend the 
tree against which I was leaning, started up my 
leg. That was too much for me, and I started 
in spite of myself. The squirrel took a flying 
leap and landed in the grass, swearing terribly. 
As darkness deepened, the grouse, one by one, 
took their departure. A clammy fog from the 
swamp enveloped us. Then Waupoose came, 
breaking brush in spite of his soft tread. 
“You no shoot?” he said. 
The barber answered, “No, but it was lucky 
that my gun was beyond reach, or I would 
have killed some of those grouse. They were 
too familiar.” 
I doubt if I could have found our horse in 
that fog and blackness; but the Indian went to 
it without difficulty. We ate supper while the 
squaw stood behind us “shooing” flies off the 
table. The flies were not all on the table, worse 
luck; but being hungry, we shut our eyes and 
ate. 
In the evening we were speculating on the 
origin of the plains we had crossed in our 
drive. Dave suddenly asked, “Either of you 
ever see thunder fire?” 
“He means lightning,” the barber remarked 
to me in an aside. 
“No, he ’ don't mean lightning,” Waupoose 
retorted. “He mean what he. say, thunder fire. 
Big fire, all the air ’fire.” 
“No, we never saw anything like that, Dave, 
what about it?” 
“Nothin’, only thunder fire make dose plains. 
One time long ago, my father he tell me, fire 
come down from above and burn up trees, 
stumps, roots, good ground—everything. That’s 
why nothing can be made to grow there 
now, good ground burned up. That was 
bad fire.” 
“That was the time of the Peshtigo fire, was 
it not?” I asked, for I had heard my father tell 
about the fall of ’71, when the very atmosphere 
was said to have been on fire. 
“Not Peshtigo fire year. I remember that; 
bad fire, too. Thunder fire long, long time ago; 
maybe two-three hunnered years; my father tell 
me and his father tell him, and his father’s 
father tell him, so on. They say by n’ by come 
’nother fire and burn up some more. By n’ by 
white man burn up, Injun he burn up, too. No 
more white mans, nor more Injuns, no more 
nothing. Injun, he knows.” 
What legend had we got hold of? We drop¬ 
ped asleep to dream of fire, but that was the 
only kind of fire we had. We nearly froze be¬ 
fore morning, for where we could see outdoors 
through a hundred cracks and crevices that 
clinging fog entered. We were both glad to 
get up at half-past four and hug the cook stove. 
“Come again,” said our host when we were 
ready to go; “come again and I will have box 
stove in front room and you have good time.” 
When asked for his bill, he said, “Oh, same as 
you pay in hotel; that be a’right.” Waupoose, 
though an Indian, is a financier. 
O. W. Smith. 
Wildfowl. 
Omaha, Neb., Dec. 24. —Editor Forest and 
Stream: While the fall shooting is now almost 
at an end, I cannot but mention that the majority 
of the Nebraska gunners take their autumn trips 
to the ducking marshes too early. Generally 
they are getting back just when they should be 
starting. The middle of October is none too 
late to leave for a prolonged camp in the haunts 
of the wildfowl, and any time during the closing 
days of the month would be more timely. 
The early sportsmen rarely get anything save 
the locally bred birds, and usually miss those 
marvelous morning and evening flights that fol¬ 
low the main passage of birds down from the 
polar regions. Where one bird is bred south 
of the Dakota line, there are 10,000 bred north 
of it, and that latter never fail to linger up 
there as long as the weather permits. 
It must be said that the majority of the early 
sportsmen in these days are not attracted afield 
mainly by the old-time greed for slaughter. That 
unholy passion has been relegated along with 
many other ancient foibles and follies to the 
realms of a dark age—a dark old age which was 
happy. 
To-day a majority of sportsmen go hunting 
and fishing for game enough only to gratify the 
cravings of the stomach for such delicacies, and 
mainly for the manifold benefits that accrue 
from a close communion with nature. They 
take as much pride, aye more, in shooting a 
flying mallard, a whirring grouse or a skulking 
coyote with their cameras as they do with their 
hammerless guns, thanks to the teaching of just 
such journals as Forest and Stream. 
Early excursions into the field in the fall, 
when the gold is on the maple and the sumach 
is aflame, are made chiefly in the hope of en¬ 
joying the outdoors in as pleasant weather as 
possible. In the old days, when the lust of blood 
was on many shooters, biting winds, cold, sleet 
and rain were regarded as the most fitting con¬ 
comitants to a ducking expedition. But it was 
surely not the real thing that impelled a man 
to lie in a lonely blind among the dank tules of 
the marsh or on a frozen bar in the river, ex¬ 
posed to all the dangers of bitter winter weather, 
but the desire to kill and to profit by the killing. 
A little of this, sort of a thing under the pres¬ 
ent market restrictions goes a long way with 
the hardiest of our sportsmen, and it is only 
the fiery younger members of the craft who 
make the venture. It is all the wildest kind of 
excitement to them, but to the old campaigner 
the balmy flood of Indian summer, sunshine, the 
last caressing breezes from the south, the color¬ 
ing vegetation, the sparkle of chilling waters 
and the goodTiye bird notes, are more than the 
biggest bag of Canadas or redheads or chickens 
that the cold and glowering days of late Novem¬ 
ber make possible. 
But for real shooting the true seasons out 
here are from Oct. 25 to early December, and 
from March 20 to the end of that month. Only 
last Sunday I was up on the Loup with Sam 
Richmond and Jake Snider, and we made a 
grand bag, nineteen mallards, the glossy-plumed 
red-legged fellows, a dozen teal and five fine 
Canada geese. All were corn fed, rolling in 
fat, and one of the most splendid lots of birds 
I ever saw. 
While the mallards and greenwings invariably 
start for softer climes with the first real hard 
freeze-up, it requires a heavy snowfall to send 
the honkers away from their favored haunts 
along Nebraska streams, lakes and bounteous 
fields. 
They are hardy, rugged fellows, care little for 
the intensest cold and are absolutely defiant of 
every species of rough and uncanny weather, 
but when the flocculent crystals begin to drift 
down from the gray heavens and bury corn, 
stubble and winter wheat, they marshal in long 
lines along the bleak bars, and with saddened 
honkings mount into the whirling mazes, and 
above them sail away for the distant and sunny 
southland. 
So out here in favored Nebraska, only for a 
brief period of the whole twelve months, is the 
sportsman deprived of facilities of engaging in 
his favorite pastime, for long after the ducks 
have gone, the geese linger., and while it is a 
trying task to hunt them in the cold days of 
late November and early’ December, the sport 
is incomparable. 
But the sport is not so easily attained now as 
it was in the days that return with such memo¬ 
ries. Then—especially in the first boisterous 
days of the early vernal season, not so much in 
the fall—morning and evening out on this legen¬ 
dary old stream, lines of dark dots arose in the 
sky, and from this one or that floated out and 
far over the awakening world, softened by height 
to a wondrous sweetness, the sonorous call of 
the Canada goose. 
Where the deep pink of the clatonia smiled 
in the face of the mad winds of Martius stood 
long rows of gray bodies with black heads and 
white-colored throats; on the knolls, where 
later the mild bluebells paled the orange fire 
of the moccasin flower, bunch after bunch of 
geese could be seen, basking in the warm sun¬ 
shine of mid-day, but whether standing in silent 
dignity or walking about to feed upon the tender 
blades of the springing grasses, whose tiny 
emerald tendrils lit up the brown of the hill¬ 
side and- the shade of the hollow, they watched 
for danger with that keen eye that made them 
so respected by those who knew them best. 
Sandy Griswold. 
